Photo Journal #3
Everyday Awe
Hi Friends!
There’s been more rain than snow in Massachusetts this relatively mild winter, making it feel like San Francisco has migrated three thousand miles west. While this has been aces for my seasonal mood derailment (right on schedule! Thanks January!), I am aware it spells doom for the planet. Very upside/catastrophic downside situation. It also means stick season has, um, really stuck. Everything is washed out in greys, browns, the muddy orange of those stalwart, foolhardy oak leaves. Finding beauty in this weird season is not impossible. It just means looking a little harder for it.
Fortunately, about a week ago we had a small snowstorm move through that left a few solid inches, which stuck around for more than fifteen minutes. The storm moved in fast, dropping thick, wet flakes. The wind picked up turning the world outside into a film still from a Rankin-Bass animated Christmas special. I’m not the intrepid snow-chasing-photographer that I admire from afar. I’m not going to bomb around on icy back roads to get that perfect shot of the old covered bridge coated in snow. Not pictured: the AAA rig hauling your car out of the icy ditch. I prefer to take my chances on foot as much as possible. If I’m going to wind up stuck in a snow bank, it’s going to be because I had to dive out of the way of a group of aggressive cross-country skiers.
The storm was strong enough that I didn’t want to venture too far, but I desperately wanted to be out to experience this world that had turned from dishwater dull to soft, bright white in the span of twenty minutes. I pulled on my boots and headed outside to wander around my neighborhood.
The unremarkable streets around my house might as well have been tucked into a corner of Narnia. Simply magical. It got me thinking about a book I had just finished reading: Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life by Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at U.C. Berkeley and “renowned expert in the science of human emotion.” This sounds like a job title a sixth-grader would give herself along with “math inventor!” Keltner gives us a way to think more deeply about a range of experiences that make us feel a connection to or glimpse of something else beyond ourselves. I call this beyond thing “the bigger architecture.” Awe is one of those things like common sense: we know it when we come across it. As Keltner explains, feelings of awe are sparked by many things. In some cases those are obvious experiences such as standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon or summiting a mountain range. But there are also less flashy instances that provoke awe: witnessing an act of human kindness, listening to music, looking at a cell under a microscope, or reading your grandparent’s letters. Awe is a Trojan horse of the extraordinary rolled in on the ordinary, here to open more than just our eyes.
Lovely shots